All Posts Tagged With: "cooperation"

The Individual and the Community

Last May sociologist Amitai Etzioni participated in a debate hosted by the Cato Institute in which he argued against the classical-liberal theory as being too atomistic, excessively concerned with selfish individualism, and neglectful of the importance of community. He’s been making this point for 20 years, which is strange for two reasons: First, it isn’t [...]

26Oct2011 | Aeon J. Skoble | 1 comment | Continued

Competition and Monopoly: A Refresher

“Gym Now Stresses Cooperation, Not Competition,” blared a headline in the New York Times a decade ago. The story was about an elementary school where “confrontational” games, team sports, and elimination rounds were changed or scrapped so that differences between students’ athletic abilities would be minimized. Perhaps this is fine for grade-school gym class, but [...]

21Apr2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 2 comments | Continued

Bowling Alone

Many afternoons my junior high school friends and I assembled at the Bloomfield (Connecticut) Bowling Alley to plunk down our quarters for shoe rental and then to bowl a few strings. So as not to make that four-mile bike ride in vain, we scheduled our outings to avoid conflict with the various leagues that had [...]

30Jun2010 | Loren Lomasky | 0 comments | Continued

Competition and Cooperation

Competition and cooperation are often juxtaposed, yet in the market they are two sides of the same activity.

10Jun2010 | Steven Horwitz | 4 comments | Continued

Cool on the Idea of Cooling Global Warming

Donald Boudreaux is chairman of the economics department at George Mason University. Here’s some self-promotion: the December 21, 2006, issue of The New York Review of Books published this letter of mine—a letter saturated with the obvious influence of FEE’s founder, Leonard Read: I’ve read few passages in your pages that are as mistaken as Bill [...]

1Apr2007 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 3 comments | Continued

How the Western Cattlemen Created Property Rights

During the last third of the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs created a vast open-range cattle industry in the Great Plains region of the United States. During the War Between the States, when Texas had been cut off from free-flowing commerce with the rest of the country, huge herds of cattle had built up on the state’s [...]

1Mar2005 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | Continued

The Individual and Society

Over lunch recently a philosophical friend of mine reflected, “U.S. history is the story of a struggle between the individual and society as a whole.” A few days later another friend, equally philosophical, said something similar: “It always comes down to a conflict between the individual and the community.” I have often heard this. The [...]

1Sep2003 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 0 comments | Continued

Competition Is Cooperation

Much animosity toward capitalism among academic critics can be accounted for by a distaste for competition. The critics just don’t like it. It seems so rough, so uncaring, so vulgar, and laboring under the misapprehension that its opposite is cooperation, they endorse the latter in righteous tones while condemning competition as the “law of the [...]

1Jun2003 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Prisoners’ Dilemmas and Cooperation

Economics is largely about how people cooperate so each can best pursue his or her objectives, whatever they may be. Decentralized market-based economies are wealthier than those based on central direction because markets facilitate the communication of the information and motivation necessary for people to cooperate, while central direction always censors that communication. Even market-based [...]

1Feb2002 | Dwight R. Lee | 1 comment | Continued

The Market Makes Diversity Worth Celebrating

The mantra on university campuses today is “celebrating diversity.” There are good reasons to encourage a greater appreciation of the rich diversity in the world. We are increasingly part of a global community; it’s important that we interact cooperatively with people of diverse backgrounds, understandings, skills, and motivations.

1Jan2002 | Dwight R. Lee | 1 comment | Continued

Take This Job and Shove It, at the Margin

Many believe that pay is overemphasized and much too unequal in market economies. Supposedly, most people enjoy working, and so while they have to be paid to survive comfortably, they don’t have to be bribed with bonuses tied to performance to do a good job. Indeed, psychological experiments indicate that the intrinsic interest people have in doing a task declines when they are paid for doing it.

1Sep2000 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | Continued

Spontaneous Order on the Playground

I recently observed an intriguing example of the evolution of a private property, market-based spontaneous order at my children’s elementary school. A group of fourth and fifth graders created a set of playground rules analogous to those I learned about in my work on spontaneous orders in the nineteenth-century gold rushes throughout the western United [...]

1Nov1999 | Andrew P. Morriss | 1 comment | Continued

May the Force Not Be With You

I’m just back from seeing Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace with my 11-year-old son, Ben. The space adventure, full of eye-popping special effects, lives up to expectations. But, alas, I must report on an aspect that will be disappointing to readers of The Freeman. The conflict that is the focus of the movie [...]

1Aug1999 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Demand and Supply

No series on the basic notions of economics can continue long without introducing demand and supply. These concepts, as illustrated with demand and supply curves, are fundamental to how economists understand economic behavior. In particular, with the use of demand and supply curves, I can supplement in concise and powerful ways my previous discussion of [...]

1Oct1998 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | Continued

Leonard E. Read, Crusader

If you had known Leonard E. Read in the 1930s, you would probably not have picked him as a future crusader for the freedom philosophy. Charismatic, energetic, debonair, he was a businessman, an organization man, a Chamber of Commerce man. In 1932, in the depth of the Depression, he became manager of the Western Division [...]

1Sep1998 | Bettina Bien Greaves | 2 comments | Continued

Such a Deal!

Let’s keep this among ourselves, but we non-rich folks have a good thing going. Even though we are of modest means, we have a huge staff of servants who perform valuable services for us. The best part is that we don’t even have to pay them. Think back to when the VCR came out almost [...]

1Jul1998 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

The Power of Incentives

The surest way to get people to behave in desirable ways is to reward them for doing so—in other words provide them with incentives. This is so obvious that you might think it hardly deserves mention. But it does. You might say that people shouldn’t have to be rewarded (bribed) to do desirable things. Even [...]

1Jun1998 | Dwight R. Lee | 1 comment | Continued
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